Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 27, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Sometimes Jesus can sound downright foolish, can’t he. We hear him say “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” He says God feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field in beauty, so don’t worry about it. He seems to be saying, indeed I think he is saying, let God take care of those mundane things. He says “strive first for the kingdom of God…and all these things will be given to you as well.” And we, or at least I, say: Really? I can just go out and do good deeds and work without pay for just causes and God will see that I have food, water, clothes, and presumably the other basic necessities of life as well? My immediate reaction is: I don’t think so! I know that some people, like Shane Claiborne, whose book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical we are reading in the once a month Monday book group, tell stories of that happening, but it certainly isn’t how life works in my experience of it. Certainly those of us who have the responsibility of providing for others, for our family or other people who are dependent on us, would be ill advised to take Jesus’ words here literally, quit our jobs, and go off like Don Quixote tilting at windmills leaving it up to God to feed, clothe, and house our children. Can Jesus, or Matthew on whom we are relying on here for Jesus’ words, really be telling us to do that? Maybe so, but if that’s the only lesson in these words I doubt that any of us are going to take them very seriously.

So what are to make of this passage from the Sermon on the Mount? To figure that out let’s take a closer look at what this passage says. Jesus begins this section of his sayings with “No one can serve two masters….You cannot serve God and wealth.” The lines that come next about not worrying about food, drink, and clothes seem to be a development of that idea, or illustrations of it. Note that in those lines Jesus says do not worry about those things and that he then says “And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” The passage then ends “Strive first for the kingdom of God…and all these things will be given to you as well.” So somehow it seems that the idea of worrying about earthly things like food and clothes is connected with the idea that no one can serve two masters. When we consider this passage as a whole, I think we can hear it telling us something considerably more helpful than simply let God provide the food, drink, and clothes.

I hear in the statement “no one can serve two masters” a question and a challenge. It might help to see that question and that challenge to know that the word in the Greek original usually translated as “masters” in the phrase “no one can serve two masters” is the same word that in other contexts is translated “lord.” Jesus’ words could, and perhaps should, be translated “no one can serve two lords.” The question in that statement is: Who is your lord? That is, who do you follow? To whom are you loyal? Who do you really serve? The assumption, as scholars point out, is that everyone serves someone or something. Even if who we serve is only ourselves, we still serve someone. Jesus is saying that we can only really serve one master or lord.

In our time theologians say the same thing in different language, and perhaps that language may be helpful. Jesus here is talking about what theologians, following Paul Tillich, call “ultimate concern.” We all have something that is our ultimate concern, something that is the most important thing to us, more important than anything else. Our ultimate concern, that thing that is more important to us than anything else, is, in Tillich’s terms, our god. Using Jesus’ terms in our passage this morning we would say that our ultimate concern, that thing that is more important to us than anything else, is our master or lord. It is that which, in the end, we serve. And Jesus is telling us that we can have only one of those ultimate concerns, one of those most important things, one of those masters or lords.

And he is saying more than that. He is saying that we must not make ourselves our ultimate concern, must not make ourselves be that which we ultimately serve. That’s what we do when we “worry” about earthly things like food and clothes. When we worry about such things, I think Jesus is saying, we care too much about them. We let them become an obsession. We let our concern over them distract us from more important things in life.

That, I think, is what Jesus is getting at when he says “strive first for the kingdom of God.” We are, I think, to understand Jesus as saying “make God your lord. Make God your master. Make God your ultimate concern.” After all, as Tillich says, only God is truly ultimate. Only God is truly beyond all things. Only God is absolute. Everything else is less than God, is not truly ultimate. So make the truly ultimate your ultimate. Make God your master. Make God your lord.

And we ask: Why? Why should I be more concerned about God that about anything else? In our text this morning Jesus says that if we do that God will take care of the mundane things like food and clothes. Let me suggest a way of understanding that saying that may be more helpful than taking it simply at face value. My experience, and the experience of a lot of people, that is consistent with what Jesus is saying here is that when we truly serve God first, when we make God our ultimate concern, everything else in our lives falls into its proper place and perspective. Let me use an example the example Jesus uses, wealth, or as the original here could also be translated, money.

We Americans worry so much about money. Our entire economy and it seems sometimes our entire society and our entire political system are built around money. As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs says, the taxation policies of both the Republicans and Democrats seem designed to protect the money of the wealthy even if we have to wipe out the American middle class and abandon all care for the poor to do it. Money is everything for us, or so it seems much of the time. I’ve known individual people for whom money is everything too. I used to work among them when I was a downtown lawyer. Maybe you’ve know people like that too. In my experience they could be pretty miserable in their relentless pursuit of money, but money was their god and they served that god in everything they did.

What happens to our view of money if we make not money but God our master, our lord, our God? All of a sudden money doesn’t seem nearly as important as it did before. Money is no longer an end in itself. It becomes merely a means toward a higher end, the end of striving for the kingdom of God as Jesus puts it. If God is your lord then your money, like everything else you have and everything else about you, must serve God. I don’t think that means be irresponsible about proving a secure life for yourself and your family. I do think that it means that once we have done that, if we are able to do that, then our attention and energies must be shifted off worrying about such things and onto building up the kingdom of God on earth.

What we’re talking about here is priorities. What are our top priorities? Ourselves? Our family? Our nation? The environment? Something else? Jesus tells us: Make God your top priority. Doing that doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that we take no care about the other priorities in our lives. It does mean that everything we do must at least be consistent with God’s kingdom. We must care for ourselves, our families, our nation, and God’s world in ways that are consistent with the values of God’s kingdom, the values of peace and justice, the values of responsible stewardship and the equitable distribution of the necessities of life. And when we have provided enough—not too much, just enough—for ourselves and our families, then our priority must be building up God’s kingdom on earth. Take care of the necessities of life. Jesus says God will provide them, but of course God can provide them only if we cooperate in the effort. Take care of the necessities of life. Just the necessities. We don’t need luxuries. We don’t need extravagance. We don’t need excess. God needs all the money and all the energy and all the creativity we put into creating luxuries, extravagance, and excess for the building up of the kingdom.

Do you ever stop to think how many people you could feed with the money it costs just to buy one diamond ring or some other bit of luxury? I know I don’t stop often enough to ask that question or other questions like it. I’m not up here to tell you that my priorities are what they should be. They aren’t. I am up here to ask you to consider whether your priorities are what they should be. Perhaps they are. That’s not for me to say. But we all need to ask the question. What master do we really serve? Who indeed is our lord? We’ve all got one, and there’s no way we can have two. It certainly is worth thinking about. Amen.